Kanam

Release Date : 27 April 2018

Starring : Naga Shaurya, Sai Pallavi

Director : AL Vijay

Music Director : Sam CS

Cinematography : Nirav Shah

Producer : Allirajah Subaskaran

Banner : Lyca Productions

Killing a baby before its born is a crime. A punishable offense if it is done without the consent of the mother and father, especially, mother. There is a casual attitude regarding this when it comes to teen pregnancy. Rather than educating kids, parents try to control and think that’s the best possible way to go forward. Kanam suffers in finding an emotional core there. It suffocates you, to say the least.

Plot : A teenage couple, Tulasi (Sai Pallavi) and Krishna (Naga Shaurya) have to deal with pregnancy before marriage. They are teenagers and their parents force an abortion as they want them to get married after 5 years when they complete their studies.

Now, after 5 years, they are married but Tulasi is haunted by Diya (Veronica), their unborn child. Why is Diya haunting her? How come she wants vengeance? What makes her stop, her actions if she does so? Watch the movie for answers

Performances : Sai Pallavi is one of the finest revelations as an actor. But she needs a character and depth to accompany her performance and enable it to be good at least. Even though she emotes, her character suffers from bad writing.

Naga Shaurya has become more dialogue dependent actor than expression dependent. He doesn’t really now, how to express in a scene which depends on him rather he just needs a line written about it to express. This hammers the movie and again, there is no character arc which was needed for him.

All others including, Veronica, Priyadarshi, Nizhalgal Ravi and many more, are just used as plain caricatures.

Technicalities : Nirav Shah delivers the goods as a Cinematographer. Even though there is nothing that challenges his caliber, the decision of the team to minimize the special computer-generated effects and go more for practical effects gave him a new challenge and he pulled it off well. Still, when the film goes for VFX in few scenes, it is highly noticeable.

Music by Sam CS is an asset. It is loud but needed to be. Still, the music gets highly noticeable than emotionally engaging as we progress further and further. This is due to bad writing again.

Editing by Anthony is smooth but the Director’s lack of understanding a good enough script and scene undermines his work too. He tried to create the best possible edit and that is noticeable.

Writer and Director, AL Vijay is a good re-creator, he can try to re-create what he saw in some other film, but he doesn’t come up with any originality. He lacks in giving depth and arc to his characters. He just writes scenes and expects you to connect with them. There is a necessity to connect with the characters and invest in them for that particular moment to work.

He never understands that. He has good visual sense but due to lack of any depth in the writing and real stakes, it all looks plastic, dramatic and unrealistic. We see actors running, actors trying something but they don’t get enough of material to really shine. Why does there be a revenge horror drama with an unborn child? You don’t get an answer. Why don’t characters remorse? You don’t get an answer. What is the purpose of the entire film, a social message slide at the end? You don’t get an answer. How deep the main couple’s love is? You don’t get a hint of it. You have to go into the mind of AL Vijay, to feel what he wrote and we don’t have Inception dream machines for that to happen.

Analysis : This is a movie with actors and characters, who could have done a magic. Who could have pulled off a gut-wrenching tale of how a “Mother” suffers when a child is killed and how desperate she gets against that very child, when he or she, demands a forcible union and revenge, that doesn’t even let the father be alive.

There is no such depth in the movie, as there is no try to invest you into the characters. Their pain and their actions. Everything is hunky-dory here. There is a good script lying somewhere in the mind of the director, but that didn’t get into words and as there is nothing substantially written on paper, there is no good happening on screen too. At best, this is a TV Movie.